Elevator pitch – The West Wing, if it were set in Westeros.
Action heroes experience some serious trauma. It’s not easy to beat up the bad guys and walk away unscathed. Even if that hero has really good reasons for putting their opposition in the vitamix, the hero still has to go home, look at their loved ones, look at themselves, and heal. That leaves marks on bodies and psyches.
The real heroes in those stories are the civil servants — the 911 operators who take the calls, the beat cops who get the civilians out of the way, the firefighters and EMS who handle the immediate emergency, the FEMA admins who get the money to get the destroyed buildings rebuilt, the social workers who handle the post-event trauma. The people who are doing the job of keeping civilization ticking.
Rebellion lives in my sandbox world, where the civil servants are the focus of the story. It’s my private soap opera, an epic fantasy with a female protagonist who is not Red Sonja. Rien isn’t an action hero. That’s not to say adventures don’t happen.
It’s a huge story, and one focal character was too limiting. Same with the standard 80-120K word limit. And the linear aspect of print publication. Maps, timelines and glossaries also have some utility. Sometimes there’s a bit of multimedia that was influential.
At the end of each chapter, the reader will find at least one link that will take the reader to the next linear chapter. Rebellion works fine as a linear work. But in some chapters, there will be options to continue following the current focal character. If that chapter’s not yet posted, the link will go to that chapter’s holding page.
Next is always a perfectly valid option. But sometimes stories want to be a Choose Your Own Adventure. Since tagging and hypertext let me do that, great. This is my sandbox world, an experiment in character and story and structure.
Rebellion is a first person world. This means the chapter headings matter — each chapter identifies its focal character, and a chapter will NEVER change focal characters. But everybody refers to themselves as “I”. The characters experience their stories, they are not observed.
Also, time matters. So the chapters will also date-stamp. The timeline will be updated as events are posted.
